Hi-
I discovered this site yesterday after about a year of doing the puzzle at Merriam-Webster. It is good and bad that there are so many puzzles available. I have a headache. I got caught a couple times when I didn't erase a letter before reassigning it but otherwise I like the format.

I have no desire to compete for scores but I look at the best times and I wonder how someone can solve it in 13 seconds. If I already knew the answer I couldn't type it in that fast. If I max out the hints I can consistently hit the average but that feels wrong. What's the story?

For what it's worth, I don't think memorizing quotes is what makes you have really fast (under 10s) solve times. Maybe that's the case on a rare occasion (especially for bansai, as he's spent so much time on the site) but for me it takes far longer to recognize a puzzle than to just figure out the patterns.

__________________
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Stephen Admin added 13,000 new quotes to this site on 11 March 2010. Within a few hours, I had solved one of the brand new quotes in six seconds. And we won't even count the ones I solved in seven, eight, nine and ten seconds. I can assure you that very fast times are not always the result of someone having seen the quote before, just as Altoid701 has remarked. Personally, I would be far more impressed with someone who had an eidetic memory which enabled them to recall all of the 50,000 quotes on this site.

ok lets stop analyzing the #$#@$ out of this and just solve the puzzles and have fun! you get faster the more you do them...you recognize pattersn etc. that's it! that's the big secret! just have fun ok?